If others saw the coast as I do, they wouldn’t destroy it
By JACK RUDLOE
The following is the forward to my book, “The Erotic Ocean: A handbook for Beach Combers,” published by World Publishing Company in 1972. It summarizes the reason we just built a classroom at Gulf Specimen Marine Lab. It is for those who come to our coast to appreciate it, and partake of its wonders—not those who come to destroy it. A great teacher and prophet named Jesus once said, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”
I’m trying... It’s taken me many years to realize that developers and builders and their pet politicians do not see the coast as I do. If they did, they might stop destroying it.
So here is what I wrote a long, long time ago:
“The ocean has been good to me. With my nets, biological dredges, and diving gear I have made a delightful living by selling her wonderful renewable resources – the living creatures that dwell in her waters and live on her bottom. I have hauled out nets gorged with struggling fish, swum through coral reefs so breathtaking with their varieties of colors, strange-looking fish, and eerie monsters that the scenes have been etched forever in my memory. I have weathered storms at sea, lived with thundering waves pounding the beaches and howling winds during a hurricane, and taken advantage of her treasures cast upon the beach when the sea calms.
“Decades have passed since I started Gulf Specimen Company, a small collecting enterprise. I settled in Panacea – a tiny fishing village in northwest Florida, so small that it seldom appears on maps – and began working with shrimpers, crab fishermen and gill netters. As time passed, the demand for specimens from schools, research laboratories, and hobbyists increased, and with the demand I had to learn more about the behavior and ecology of the marine animals and plants of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast. There was, and still is, much to learn.
“A collecting business is subject to tides, winds and weather. It follows the movements of jellyfish, the migrations of squid, the ripeness of sea-urchin eggs and the spawning patterns of polychaete worms. Large conchs spew out ribbons of accordion like egg capsules, and purple sea hares ooze copious green strings containing millions of jelly-coated eggs. Female blue crabs carry thousands of developing larvae under their aprons in the form of a sponge, and commercial shrimp migrate to the deep waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf and explosively burst forth sperm and egg that unite--and the tiny planktonic larvae drift shoreward with the tides and currents, along with uncountable numbers of fish eggs, larval fish and a host of other developing creatures. The ocean is so full of life, so productive that one can only marvel at it.
“In a tide pool of this erotic ocean, needily female sea urchins spew out bright red eggs into the water and the males exude white sperm from the little pores between their spines. The waters turn cloudy with gametes, and hundreds of sperm mass around a single egg, causing it to spin and gyrate. Then one penetrates and a clear fertilization membrane almost magically appears. The fertilized egg goes on spinning and then starts dividing, first into two cells, then four and now into eight and soon it hatches into a tiny ciliated larva that joins the plankton in the sea. The miracle of life, the conception of all living things, can be so easily studied from life in the sea. At midnight in the calm bays and estuaries of north Florida, you sometimes hear male porpoises letting out exuberant whimpering calls to their mates, and under the moonlight you hear them splashing about. Then the lumbering sea turtle comes ashore, dragging her heavy shell over the white sands and depositing her eggs high up on the beach.
“Throughout the marshes and mangrove swamps shorebirds lay their eggs and the young hatch and feed upon the tiny fish and fiddler crabs. The waters become milky with veliger larvae of oysters during the spawning seasons, and soon the wharf pilings and dead shells are growing anew with tiny young oysters. The waters teem with gametes of sponges, tunicates, hydroids and tiny crustaceans, which unite and settle on the bottom. The conditions must be just right for them to take hold and grow to maturity. Only a particular weed-grown rock may be suitable for a terebellid worm to colonize, or only a coarse sand bottom in high saline waters is right for lancelet larvae to settle in. Grass shrimp seek the protective grasses of tidal marshes, and spiny boxfish and long-legged arrow crabs live among the sea grasses. “The ocean does not give up easily the secrets of where to find these animals. Only by traveling around and diligently searching in her rock piles and mudflats, day after day and year after year, will you learn when creatures spawn and what they eat and where they hide.”
Jack Rudloe is the President of Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratories, Inc. in Panacea.